Starbucks hasn’t been decent for a decade, and it was debatably decent before then - you either liked their coffee or didn’t. I have definitely noticed a downturn in their coffee quality. Bland and indistinct. Same with Dunks, they used to have a distinct flavor, but that’s gone in favor of a watered down generic coffee.

They’re both suffering from enshittification, where prices go up, variety and quality go down in favor of propping up the quarterly report.

Anyway, point being, corporate coffee chains suck. Just buy from a decent local shop. Coffee and pastries, or even a real decent breakfast sandwich, can be had and taken on the go. Taste way better and supports a local business.

What the F, TJ? Want to make a loyal customer of 15+ years quit? This is how you do it. We’re a union family, we vote with our dollars too.

I would really need to see the math on this. All of the numbers. Plenty of people bitch and moan about taxes, but there’s no way income tax should result in a continually smaller paycheck because the recipient got a raise, nor should a raise be consumed entirely by taxes. Anyone who tells a story about losing all their raise to tax isn’t telling the whole story most likely, like filing for too many withholding exemptions on the W4, paying less tax, then getting slammed with a tax bill “consuming all their raise” or something.

Now, I have heard of people running into issues with the AMT, but that’s for people already making a pretty good amount of money, and that limits (crudely explained) says even though you made a bunch of money more and have a ton of write offs/deductions, the AMT floor won’t let the filer get all the deductions so they pay more tax. That also might come up if one sells a house or something and brings in a bunch of money. But that’s not a situation most people face, and they shouldn’t see it regularly. It was intended to prevent wealthy people from skipping out on taxes.

“To be fair,” no it can’t, at least not in the US. The top tax bracket for income I think is around 37%. And the next lowest is in the high 20s, but I don’t know what the $ amount is, but I think you gotta clear a half mil + a year before you get to that 37%. So make a mil a year? 37%. 2 mil? 37%. No matter what you’re making you’re not getting to 100%. So I don’t know where you live, but here in the US there’s no way to hit 100% on personal income tax, the tax that’s being discussed.

Then that would have been a good clarification to include in the statement. But when someone said their raises are eaten by taxes, one immediately assumes income tax.

That’s not possible. That’s not how tax brackets work at all.

Good for them.

We’re subsidizing corporate profits, to be clear. But yes.

Back to Company Towns and Company Stores.

Too poor to have the time to educate themselves, look for other jobs, or move. Not much has changed with Walmart, infamously they have been making the taxpayers prop up their employees’ low wages and benefits for decades.

You said it yourself when you compared cars to guns. Can’t really have it both ways by holding some manufacturers liable for the unintended uses of their products and giving others a pass. You could argue the same for knifemakers, baseball bat makers, etc. They’re both fairly good at causing traumatic injury or death. Cars OTOH are designed to prevent injuries or death as much as possible, even if they hit a pedestrian.

That said, you are absolutely correct about guns purpose being to deliver injury or death at a distance. That’s why they exist in the first place. No equivocation can change that, I don’t care if people target shoot with them or whatever, they’re killing machines.

Problem is that guns are a right in the US. There is absolutely no way on this earth that the people who wrote that right as an amendment had any clue of what guns would turn into, how they would be politicized, how people would have personal arsenals, or how much death they would cause among the population. Their shortsighted brevity when writing that amendment has killed tens of thousands of people every year.